ToMaTo: A Trustworthy Code Mashup Development Tool

Recent years have seen the emergence of a new programming paradigm for Web applications that emphasizes the reuse of external content, the mashup. Although the mashup paradigm enables the creation of innovative Web applications with emergent features, its openness introduces trust problems. These trust issues are particularly prominent in JavaScript code mashup - a type of mashup that integrated external Javascript libraries to achieve function and software reuse. With JavaScript code mashup, external libraries are usually given full privileges to manipulate data of the mashup application and executing arbitrary code. This imposes considerable risk on the mashup developers and the end users. One major causes for these trust problems is that the mashup developers tend to focus on the functional aspects of the application and implicitly trust the external code libraries to satisfy security, privacy and other non-functional requirements. In this paper, we present ToMaTo, a development tool that combines a novel trust policy language and a static code analysis engine to examine whether the external libraries satisfy the non-functional requirements. ToMaTo gives the mashup developers three essential capabilities for building trustworthy JavaScript code mashup: (1) to specify trust policy, (2) to assess policy adherence, and (3) to handle policy violation. The contributions of the paper are: (1) a description of JavaScript code mashup and its trust issues, and (2) a development tool (ToMaTo) for building trustworthy JavaScript code mashup

A Domain-Specific Language for Do-It-Yourself Analytical Mashups

The increasing amount and variety of data available in the web leads to new possibilities in end-user focused data analysis. While the classic data base technologies for data integration and analysis (ETL and BI) are too complex for the needs of end users, newer technologies like web mashups are not optimal for data analysis. To make productive use of the data available on the web, end users need easy ways to find, join and visualize it. We propose a domain specific language (DSL) for querying a repository of heterogeneous web data. In contrast to query languages such as SQL, this DSL describes the visualization of the queried data in addition to the selection, filtering and aggregation of the data. The resulting data mashup can be made interactive by leaving parts of the query variable. We also describe an abstraction layer above this DSL that uses a recommendation-driven natural language interface to reduce the difficulty of creating queries in this DSL

Enhancement of the usability of SOA services for novice users

Recently, the automation of service integration has provided a significant advantage in delivering services to novice users. This art of integrating various services is known as Service Composition and its main purpose is to simplify the development process for web applications and facilitates reuse of services. It is one of the paradigms that enables services to end-users (i.e.service provisioning) through the outsourcing of web contents and it requires users to share and reuse services in more collaborative ways. Most service composers are effective at enabling integration of web contents, but they do not enable universal access across different groups of users. This is because, the currently existing content aggregators require complex interactions in order to create web applications (e.g., Web Service Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL)) as a result not all users are able to use such web tools. This trend demands changes in the web tools that end-users use to gain and share information, hence this research uses Mashups as a service composition technique to allow novice users to integrate publicly available Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) services, where there is a minimal active web application development. Mashups being the platforms that integrate disparate web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to create user defined web applications; presents a great opportunity for service provisioning. However, their usability for novice users remains invalidated since Mashup tools are not easy to use they require basic programming skills which makes the process of designing and creating Mashups difficult. This is because Mashup tools access heterogeneous web contents using public web APIs and the process of integrating them become complex since web APIs are tailored by different vendors. Moreover, the design of Mashup editors is unnecessary complex; as a result, users do not know where to start when creating Mashups. This research address the gap between Mashup tools and usability by the designing and implementing a semantically enriched Mashup tool to discover, annotate and compose APIs to improve the utilization of SOA services by novice users. The researchers conducted an analysis of the already existing Mashup tools to identify challenges and weaknesses experienced by novice Mashup users. The findings from the requirement analysis formulated the system usability requirements that informed the design and implementation of the proposed Mashup tool. The proposed architecture addressed three layers: composition, annotation and discovery. The researchers developed a simple Mashup tool referred to as soa-Services Provisioner (SerPro) that allowed novice users to create web application flexibly. Its usability and effectiveness was validated. The proposed Mashup tool enhanced the usability of SOA services, since data analysis and results showed that it was usable to novice users by scoring a System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 72.08. Furthermore, this research discusses the research limitations and future work for further improvements

The Mashup Component Description Language

ABSTRACT Mashups can be seen as the result of software composition applied to the Web. One of the characteristics of mashup development is the heterogeneity of its building components in terms of logical layering (e.g., user interface, application logic, and data), access method (e.g., REST, SOAP), and composition technique (e.g., scraping vs. clipping, synchronous vs. asynchronous interaction, discrete vs. streaming). This poses a challenge towards the design of mashup tools aiming at lowering the barriers of mashup development, as this heterogeneity needs to be abstracted. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing a new JSONbased domain-specific language for describing heterogeneous mashup components, called the Mashup Component Description Language (MCDL). MCDL lies at the core of a meta-model for mashup component modeling, and can be used for component discovery and classification but also for user-centric mashup development as it decouples the interface of a mashup component from its underlying implementation technologies

Abmash: Mashing Up Legacy Web Applications by Automated Imitation of Human Actions

Many business web-based applications do not offer applications programming interfaces (APIs) to enable other applications to access their data and functions in a programmatic manner. This makes their composition difficult (for instance to synchronize data between two applications). To address this challenge, this paper presents Abmash, an approach to facilitate the integration of such legacy web applications by automatically imitating human interactions with them. By automatically interacting with the graphical user interface (GUI) of web applications, the system supports all forms of integrations including bi-directional interactions and is able to interact with AJAX-based applications. Furthermore, the integration programs are easy to write since they deal with end-user, visual user-interface elements. The integration code is simple enough to be called a "mashup".Comment: Software: Practice and Experience (2013)

Process-oriented Enterprise Mashups

Mashups, a new Web 2.0 technology provide the ability for easy creation of Web-Based applications by end-users. The uses of the mashups are often consumer related. In this paper we explore how mashups can be used in the enterprise area and hat the criteria for enterprise mashups are. We provide categories for the classification of enterprise mashups, and based upon a motivating example we go further in depth on business process enterprise mashup

Shortcomings of learning design approaches and a possible way out

Shifting away from traditional instructional design to younger research streams like personalized, workflow-based or collaborative e-learning, learning design (LD) has become an important issue in the field of technology-enhanced learning. Nevertheless, current LD approaches turn out to be rather unhandy or costly in teaching and research practice. In this paper, we discuss these shortcomings and propose an alternative solution approach which is based on a web application mashup, learner interactions, and a semantic layer for tool recommendations. As the evaluation of our first prototype is in progress, we can not highlight first experiences, but outline benefits and possible application scenarios in this position paper

Mashing up Visual Languages and Web Mash-ups

Research on web mashups and visual languages share an interest in human-centered computing. Both research communities are concerned with supporting programming by everyday, technically inexpert users. Visual programming environments have been a focus for both communities, and we believe that there is much to be gained by further discussion between these research communities. In this paper we explore some connections between web mashups and visual languages, and try to identify what each might be able to learn from the other. Our goal is to establish a framework for a dialog between the communities, and to promote the exchange of ideas and our respective understandings of humancentered computing.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

A Framework Supporting Development of Ontology-Based Web Applications

We have developed a framework to support development of ontology based Web applications. This framework is composed of a tree-view browser, an attribute selector, the ontology persistence module, an ontology query module, and a utility class that allows the users, to plug-in their own customized functions. The framework supports SPARQL-DL query language. The purpose of this framework is to shield the complexity of ontology from the users and thereby ease the development of ontology based Web applications. Having high quality ontology and using this framework, the end-users can develop Web applications in many domains. For example, a professor can create highly customized study guides; a domain expert can generate the Web forms for data collections; a geologist can create a Google Maps mashup. We have also reported three ontology-based Web applications in education, meteorology and geographic information system

A look at cloud architecture interoperability through standards

Enabling cloud infrastructures to evolve into a transparent platform while preserving integrity raises interoperability issues. How components are connected needs to be addressed. Interoperability requires standard data models and communication encoding technologies compatible with the existing Internet infrastructure. To reduce vendor lock-in situations, cloud computing must implement universal strategies regarding standards, interoperability and portability. Open standards are of critical importance and need to be embedded into interoperability solutions. Interoperability is determined at the data level as well as the service level. Corresponding modelling standards and integration solutions shall be analysed